How Meryl Streep Shaped The Devil Wears Prada and Its Villain, Miranda Priestly

In just one week, The Devil Wears Prada, the book adaptation that had us all pursing our lips and murmuring, “That’s all,” turns 10 years old. To celebrate the decade this movie has spent strutting its stuff, Variety conducted an oral history.

The piece is delightfully thorough, and well worth reading in full: one of its biggest revelations is just how many of the movie’s high points originated with none other than cinematic fashion maven Meryl Streep—or, as she was known in the movie, Miranda Priestly.

Speaking with Variety, Streep said that the film was her first foray into high-stakes pay negotiations. She’d always been hesitant to play hardball in the past, but said that her initial Prada offer felt far too low: “There was my ‘goodbye moment,’ and then they doubled the offer,” Streep said. “I was 55, and I had just learned, at a very late date, how to deal on my own behalf.”

Once Streep was in, it was apparently her idea to include at least two of the movie’s most memorable moments. The first is the scene in which Miranda Priestly schools Anne Hathaway’s Andy Sachs about how her “lumpy blue sweater . . . trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin”—a bit Streep suggested in order to round out her character and establish Miranda’s industry prowess.

And the second?

“I also wanted,” Streep says, “a scene where she is without her armor,
the unpeeled scene in the hotel room—just to see that face without it
protective glaze, to glimpse the woman in the businesswoman.”

In shaping her persona, Streep told Variety that she drew her inspiration from some unexpected sources—all of them men. And some of her choices surprised her co-stars. Hathaway told Variety that everyone had expected “a strident, bossy, barking voice. So when Meryl opened her mouth and basically whispered, everybody in the room drew a collective gasp. It was so unexpected and brilliant.”

Streep’s inspiration for the voice came from an unexpected source: Clint Eastwood, whom she noted “never, ever, ever raises his voice” and instead forces everyone to listen intently to him. Meanwhile, Miranda’s trademark combination of biting wit and a “self-amused curlicue of irony” came from Mike Nichols, whom Streep worked with on Silkwood, Heartburn, and HBO’s Angels in America.